From Fedora Project Wiki

I'm man-pages and man package maintainer and I want to start to create some rules to man-pages to package guildelines. Man-pages are the most common documentation so it could be useful to have some rules for them too.

Statistic for fc11/fc12

  • At first I want to find out the number of binaries from directories /bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin and /usr/bin which have no man-page.

From this numbers there could be generated some recommendations like: all binaries in ... directories should have man page.

Statistic about man-pages (generated from fc12 installation DVD content - 2400 rpms ) :

directory number of missing man-pages number of binaries/scripts percentage of missing man pages
/bin 12 110 11%
/sbin 50 326 15%
/usr/sbin 125 431 29%
/usr/bin 1270 2814 45%

Statistic about man-pages (generated from fc11 installation DVD content - 2252 rpms ) :

directory number of missing man-pages number of binaries/scripts percentage of missing man pages
/bin 14 108 13%
/sbin 55 324 17%
/usr/sbin 141 447 32%
/usr/bin 1326 3149 42%

Proposal

  • For now(fc12) there have only 62 binaries/scripts in /bin and /sbin which have no man page. It about 14 percentage of all binaries/scripts. Since fedora 11 the number lower a bit. It see, for me to be good reasons to have some guidelines like:

"The binaries and scripts which are in /bin and /sbin directories should have man page which describes their behaviour."


Other ideas

  • there could be done some other activities - add test for missing man-pages to rpmlint, add there some tool which will check options man-page declare and options which the tool accept or some spell checker. There could be also do a test which check whether the man-pages are in good path.

Links

MAN pages which exists in other places(draft) - MAN_pages_which_exists_in_other_places(draft)